Adam Levine has slammed The Voice adviser Taylor Swift for pulling her music from Spotify but fellow Voice judge Blake Shelton defended her decision.
“Music is for everyone,” Levine said recently on BuzzFeed Brews.
“I don’t care how anybody obtains it as long as they get it and enjoy and love it.”
He added that as long as the consumer is “supporting the artist in some way,” they should be able to access music how they choose.
“Music should be able to be wherever it is,” he said. “That’s how I feel.”
Shelton, though, noted the logic of Swift’s position.
“I know Spotify’s in kind of an experimental phase, changing with the industry, and I can see why she did that. I don’t disagree with her and I know a lot of artists have followed suit,” he said.
“When you look at the numbers, it’s easy to say ‘That’s Taylor Swift — why is she so worried about money?’ But when you talk about other writers and songwriters on the album who aren’t Taylor Swift, it hits them pretty hard. I don’t disagree with her at all.”
Swift’s decision to pull her music off of Spotify has generated a lot of debate, and some other artists decided to pull their music, including Justin Moore and Brantley Gilbert.
It has also brought attention to how some musicians and bands, including Garth Brooks, Tool, and AC/DC have never let any of their music on the streaming service.
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Spotify says that it offers musicians and bands $0.006 to $0.0084 per stream, which some believe is not enough. Swift’s Shake It Off was the top earning song on Spotify in October, being streamed 46.3 million times but only generating between $280,000 and $390,000 for the musician and singer.
Swift’s decisions have paid some dividends already--Nielsen Music Connect told Mashable that Swift’s daily YouTube views doubled since Swift pulled her songs from Spotify on November 3.
The streams on her YouTube videos jumped from about 12.5 million on that day to almost 24 million on November 29.
I think the thing is you just have to put the music first,” Brooks told FOX recently.
“The government passed a lot of laws really quickly that allowed technology to kind of just use music as a tool without paying for it, and I'd like to see the government revisit that because music could come back to front and center if we could get some help.”
